Computer systems and networks have facilitated the tasks of buying, selling and transferring goods. For example, global computer networks, such as the Internet, have allowed purchasers to relatively quickly and efficiently seek and purchase goods online. Similarly, global computer networks provide an efficient and cost-effective medium for sellers to advertise, offer, provide, and sell their goods. Electronic commerce companies provide buyers and sellers with online services and the infrastructure to accept orders of goods from remote purchasers, to perform the financial transactions necessary to confirm and complete the sale of goods, to ship or distribute the goods to remote purchasers, and to perform other related logistics. For these reasons, sellers actively use the Internet to offer, sell and distribute a wide variety of goods to take advantage of the many benefits provided by the Internet and electronic commerce.
One example of a market for goods within the realm of electronic commerce is the secondary ticket market. The secondary ticket market encompasses all instances in which live event tickets trade after the original point of purchase. This market exists for several reasons. First, event tickets have an especially time-sensitive nature. Numerous tickets expire unused each year because there is no efficient mechanism to buy and/or sell secondary event tickets. When a ticket expires after an event has passed, it loses all of its intrinsic value. As a result, if the ticket holder cannot attend the event, the only way to realize value for a ticket is to sell it in the secondary market. For example, many venues, universities and/or sports franchises offer “season tickets” which are often packaged in bulk requiring a buyer to purchase several tickets at once. As a result, season ticket holders often possess a number of tickets for events that they cannot attend, and therefore desire to sell on the secondary market.
Additionally, event venues have only a fixed supply of seating. Therefore, the number of available tickets for a particular event is limited, which means that high-demand events can have significant volumes of secondary trading. Buyers, who would like to sit only in certain seat locations, further create a supply and demand imbalance. Particularly, each seat location in a venue is totally unique, which means there could be demand for a specific seat location that exceeds supply even when the venue is not sold out in the primary market, thereby favoring the secondary market. Moreover, while tickets for certain events (e.g., football games of a team in the same venue) may be similarly priced, the actual supply and demand for such events may be substantially different, thereby favoring the secondary market.
StubHub provides a network-based system which implements an online secondary ticket marketplace for buyers and sellers of tickets for live events such as sports, concerts, theater, and other entertainment events. The StubHub online secondary ticket marketplace enables legitimate, convenient, reliable, and secure transactions at fair market value and provides ticket fulfillment services, even for “sold out” events. Accordingly, the StubHub online secondary ticket marketplace provides benefits for fans who wish to buy, sell or otherwise transfer secondary tickets as well as for teams, artists, and venues.